Note: These pages are no longer maintained by the Computer Interest Group of the Genealogical Society, and the material on this page is therefore now only of historical interest, and does not necessarily reflect current interests or activities.Go to:
The initial purpose of the Computer Interest Group, therefore, was to make information about genealogical computing available to genealogists in Southern Africa. A newsletter was published for a while, which was used to inform people about the programs that were available, what hardware they would need to run them, and so on.
After a couple of years, the newsletter began to become repetitious. Beginners wanted to see information that had already been published, while people who had got beyond that stage found that reading the same old thing was boring. By that time, too, there were enough people in the local branches of the Genealogical Society who were using computers themselves to initiate newcomers into the mysteries of genealogical computing.
The Computer Interest Group then moved on to a new phase - developing software for recording genealogical source material. One of the first projects along this line was the Cemetery Recording Program, developed by Martin Zoellner and Stephen Hayes.
In 1989, when the Computer Interest Group started, computer bulletin board networks were just beginning to take off in South Africa. A genealogy conferences was started on Fidonet, the first BBS network, and soon reached the major cities in South Africa. Within a few months it had become international, linking Britain, Germany, North America, Australia and New Zealand. It is still active, and links genealogists in many countries, though unfortunately South African participation has been much lower than that from other countries.
At the moment the main purpose of the Computer Interest Group is to provide a forum for discussion of the use of computers in genealogical research. The group is rather amorphous - there are no distinct boundaries. Anyone who is interested can join in the discussion. There are also no rigid boundaries to the things that can be discussed, other than that they should concern genealogical computing.
One topic that should be of interest is the transcription of genealogical source material, and developing standards for recording. An example of this is the Cemetery Recording Program. The primary place for such discussions is the International Genealogy Conference on the Fidonet BBS network, but the development of different forums for discussing such things is also open to discussion. These Web pages are maintained by the Computer Interest Group to provide an intorduction to people who are interested in discussing genealogical computing. If you are interested in geenealogical research in general, you may also look at the Web pages of the Genealogical Society of South Africa at http://www.rootsweb.com/~zafgssa/Eng/. There is also a page of contact addresses for the various branches of the society at this site - look at the contacts page. There is also a Usenet newsgroup for discussing genealogical computing - soc.genealogy.computing, and another for discussing genealogical research in Africa, soc.genealogy.african. For specifically South African genealogy there is a mailing list. See http://home.global.co.za/~mercon/sagenlist.html
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Martin Zoellner and Stephen Hayes started developing a program that could be used to record the inscriptions, and produce rudimentary reports, and also transfer the data to the computer of the State Archives. The program is not completely developed yet, but a working test version is available for download from BBSs, with the file name of CEM063.ZIP.
Church records often provide useful information, but there are something like 8000 different denominations and sects in South Africa alone. Their records are often scattered among different local congregations and parishes. Some denominations deposit these records in central archives, others do not. A project for transcribing them using computers could make them more accessible - but if such a thing is to be useful, it would be best to agree on standards for the transcription, so that the records could then be searched in a single database.
It should be possible to develop a program similar to the cemetery recording one for transcription of church registers. This would make it possible for volunteers to transcribe records using a consistent and compatible format. This is one of the things that needs to be discussed, not only among South African genealogists, but those in other countries too. We need to be able to agree on standard formats for recording data from such sources, so that data from different recorders can be compiled into a central database.
Oral history is also one of the points at which genealogy, family history and local history overlap. The history of a family is often bound up with the history of a particular community, and recording the family and community history could be part of a joint endeavour.
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One of the best ways of discussing these concerns of the Computer Interest Group is through electronic networking - through BBS networks and the Internet. But this is one thing that South African genealogists have been extraordinarily reluctant to do. We have had a BBS network easily accessible in most of the bigger cities in the country, and in a few of the smaller towns as well, but very few people have made use of it. If people are seriously interested in genealogical computing, and being involved in the Computer Interest Group to discuss such things, and to work out solutions to common problems, a modem would be a good investment.
If you have access to the Internet at work, through a direct connection, and not through a modem, you will not be able to access many BBSs directly. A few BBSs are accessible through Telnet, though.
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